Opinion Contributor

Rebalancing the military in Asia and the Pacific

Rebalancing cannot be sustained on its original terms, the author writes. | AP Photo

That leaves the big enchilada — the reassignment of naval assets so that 60 percent will now be in the Pacific. An upper bound on the dollar significance of this shift can be calculated as follows: Since the Navy’s annual budget is about $150 billion and some two-thirds of that (or $100 billion) is for the deployable Navy, we need to take 60 percent of $100 billion now and compare it with 50 percent of $100 billion before. The net is a $10 billion increase (though there is potentially some double counting here due to the attack submarine and Littoral Combat Ship estimates as previously noted).

The bottom line is this: In round numbers, the rebalancing may be in the process of swinging $10 billion to $12 billion or a bit more in annual Pentagon expenditures to the Asia-Pacific region.

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This shift is hardly insignificant — though it hardly represents a tectonic change, either. Indeed, in recent years, China’s overall military budget has been growing about this amount each year, whereas the rebalancing was a one-time thing that is not presently scheduled to be followed up by additional policy changes.

On top of all that, sequestration is now promising to take $50 billion out of the Pentagon’s annual budget for the next decade (and the earlier, initial cuts from the 2011 Budget Control Act had already taken out a comparable amount previously). In rough terms, one might break down today’s Pentagon budget as being roughly one-third for Asia-Pacific matters, one-third for the Middle East and one-third for general purposes. Of course, all combat forces are flexible and movable, but in broad terms, this is still not a bad way to paint the overall picture. So one-third of that $50 billion sequestration hit might well come out of capabilities for the Asia-Pacific — maybe a bit less if we are able to protect this region’s capabilities selectively. Whatever the precise number, the key point is that sequestration will very likely cut about as much from our regional capability as the rebalancing will add.

The takeaways here are twofold. First, while the military capacities of a superpower still spending more than half a trillion a year on its armed forces should hardly be trivialized, and while we will modernize forces in the years ahead in ways discussed recently by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the annual Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore, the rebalancing itself is not a huge military deal. Policymakers in Beijing need not strongly object and should not feel “contained.” Second, however, for those who think that sequestration is having no appreciable effect on American military posture, they should think again. Perhaps the rebalancing was not needed in the first place or was not needed for very long in any event. But it cannot be sustained on its original terms in the face of such steep Pentagon budgetary reductions, if they are sustained.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is author of the new book, “Healing the Wounded Giant: Maintaining Military Preeminence While Cutting the Defense Budget.”